I don't want to have a fight on the internet.
I know that's rich, coming from me, if you have even a little backstory—
such backstory being I parlayed a strange hobby beefing with rich guys into a job at a unicorn as the last cycle heated up
—but I'm almost 40 years old, man.
I don't have the energy to carry all this beef in my heart. I survived the absolute rollercoaster terror of 2020.
I want a nice time talking to reasonable people about interesting things. That is my social desire.
And Mastodon has a serious social illness that cannot be ignored.
Just a terrible apathy for collaboration. A penchant for sealioning at best, straight up default hostility at worst
So I'm going on record right now: I believe this problem will be Mastodon's dead end.
It suffocates culture. You know my deepest conviction is that technology is not enough.
It's a crime because Mastodon is a beautiful thing.
A miracle, some ways, BOTH technological and social. The successful federation, the macro-moderation it enables, the thriving volume of instances.
The fact that as a truly evil plutocrat bought a commons and then began deplatforming its journalists, Mastodon could provide a truly workable alternative.
Extraordinary.
BUT: Mastodon is its own worst enemy.
Its querulous, joyless norms will set a ceiling on its impact.
Maybe they can fix it?
@danilo I don’t think you can fix a network’s culture, sadly. The interesting question is whether you can extend the protocol (and/or fix the UX) to improve the social affordances and then boot up a new community/network, using the news affordances to *help* avoid the worst behaviors as the network grows+matures.
(That said, I worry that a lot of the problems aren’t Masto-specific; Bluesky also has a lot of similar, terrible behavior, as did Twitter. May be an artifact of text-first culture.)
@luis_in_brief I shall look forward to that, and meanwhile, I’ll just add that I think your scenario is the most likely one for the optimistic case
There's just enough power in the successful federation to make it plausible to me
Attached: 1 image inspired by recent events i'm finally reading Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures by André Brock Jr. and it is exposing me to a vast number of ways to consider relations to technology and in particular how Black life has always been vivid throughout recent technologies. i found chapter 2's case study of the Blackbird web browser incredibly evocative for me personally and particularly relevant to discussions of free software
bsky: @daniloc.xyz
Luis Villa
eshamow
d@nny disc@ mc²